Discussion (78) ¬

So, Phlogiston, unnamed fire-user with bad taste in catchphrases, Neuronet, The Conjurer, and 84. Yep, one from each group, leaders or not. ‘Leaders’ is a good guess because they were generally the people who spoke first when confronting him.

Never let it be said that I can’t admit when I’m wrong, I went back and looked at the panel again, you guys are right, it is an ‘F’ not a ‘P’. I feel really silly, it took me like 5 minutes of staring at the screen to understand why the ‘F’ looked like a ‘P’.

Check out http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/10172014/. Meson is the top left figure (see previous comic for his intro). The fire-user comes in in the bottom panel with a different team. Similar colors, but different costume, different effects, different team.

A leader is not always the one with positional power. On a true team, leaders can shift often and seamlessly depending upon the situation. So, is 84 a leader? Yes. She is already asserting her abilities once teleported to the new location, whether she knows it or not.

Well, I think we can identify several qualities Veles is looking for in his new nemesis:
– All five are metahumans capable of independent flight
– All five are de facto leaders in their respective cliques
– All five have a penchant for stating the obvious

They’re more similar than they are different: either they’re going to become great friends by the end of the ordeal or they’re going to tear each other apart.

I don’t know. All of the available choices were capable of flight, and while the Rockslide look-alike needed a jet-pack, I can’t tell if Neuromind’s flight comes from similar technological assistance (i.e., the disk-things on his suit). Plus Phlogiston did not seem like the leader in her group – Meson did – and the wind Elementalist seemed more like the leader than the fire one who got chosen. And the only thing “Fire-man” has said is “Fire in the hole, baby!”, which (at least to me) doesn’t qualify as “the obvious”.

Your conclusion, however, I think is totally valid. Then again, I only guessed right on three of the five, so you should probably only pay attention to 60% of what I say.

The circles are similar, and you might be right. However, on the following page the circles around his head were gone, but he was still airborne. So if they weren’t using technological means to stay airborne, my guess would be that the ghostly female member of their team was handling the levitation duties.

Unfortunately there’s not enough to go on with the current page for me to generate more incorrect speculations – I’ll have to wait for the next update.

Veles doesn’t need them to fetch it. It’s just for the lulz mostly. Most of them don’t seem to get that. It also may not look like a traditional eye and he only said they had to ‘claim’ it, not ‘fetch’ it. You really have to pay attention with these God-types.

If a bathrobe is sufficient to hitchhike the galaxy, why is it in poor taste when fighting crime? Is it it over-formal? Not sufficiently revealing?
(Consider the average superhero costume – looks like a drag race carr or a professional skier without the restraint, or like a swimsuit.)

Personally, I think that “the Conjuror” ‘s outfit looks like Starlord’s from the beginning of the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ movie, although, I suppose that Starlord could have been wearing a high tech alien version of a bathrobe.

Using Chrome OS and having no ad problems with this site whatsoever. In fact, I only see the three ads over in the left sidebar with a lot of empty space to the left of that. I think it might have something to do with your display aspect ratio, my laptop is 16:9(HDTV). If you have one of the older 4:3 ratio displays (standard TV) then you might get overlap.

Huh…. Phlogiston presumable has fire powers, which means this group of five has two fire casters. Conjuror and Neuronet both may have some way to influence peoples’ minds.
That means the only one of the five with a unique skill set is… 84.

Mm. Neuronet’s go-to seems to be mind control, while Conjuror should (if the name makes sense, which it might not) summon creatures and substances. As for Phlogiston, phlogiston was released when substances were burned… phlogisticated air is full of carbon dioxide, so she might just have gas-related powers not encompassing combustion.

Alchemist’s believed that an invisible substance called “Phlogistin” allowed substances to burn. One of their goals was to find a way to transfer this from one substance to another. From wood into stone for example, which would allow them to burn the stone.

The Dragon Tree Spellbook, part of the Arduin Grimoire game system, had a spell called “Flying Phlogiston” that would do it. That system was never as popular as D&D though.

So… What are the chances of 84 just throwing the game? It’s not like she particularly wants the prize, and she’s too good a person to try to win just to spite the others (much as they deserve it). OTOH, she’s also too good to just phone it in. :\

Something tells me that whoever gets the smack laid down on them will be because of their own stupidity, walking boldly (and cockily) into a situation where patience and thought would be better used, and -none- of this group (84 excepted) have shown any ability to do this (they all arrived on the scene claiming that their group would be the ones to lay the smack on Veles…)

Actually, Phlogiston was not being one of the vocally loud ones. If you look back a couple of pages, she is explaining to Xenon what a ren-fest is. And “Fire in the Hole” should be the first to go down, as he seems to be all cliche.

My prediction is that 84 won’t be the one to claim and bring the Eye to Veles- however, even if technically she doesn’t qualify to be the new Champion of Earth, I’m sure Veles will consider 84 a truer, more worthy Champion than the person who did. Veles is, after all, a trickster god. Besides: “… mine is the only opinion that matters.”

Atlas is, of course, something of an expy of Superman and Veles is something of an expy of Myxzptlk. And those stories are always an opportunity to demonstrate Superman’s high intelligence and ways to work around a problem that can’t just be punched with what tools he has.

So while we’ve seen little of Atlas and what we saw didn’t give him an opportunity for him to really flex that intelligence, what we’re seeing here is the evidence of something he did on the off-times battling this trickster god where his intelligence would be most paramount.

the big thing in this arc is that it really feels like Earth-238 is undergoing events similar to those that shaped Argos (replace ‘teams’ with ‘house’, and how its very easy for her ‘team’ to switch goals from ‘FISS recognition’ to ‘FISS supremacy’), just like this contest just from the basic rules, is a magic version of that between Argos and the Emerald Ones

Good point, but probably different starting circumstances: Earth’s FISS movement is currently (reluctantly) led by 84, who is very much not a “kill all non-FISS” person and has seen the result of such thinking on Argos.

At first I thought that the F.I.S.S.-only supergroup was the first of its kind. Given the four other groups that appeared in this story and the opinion of other supers toward the ‘grunts’ it seems to be more of a defensive move.

That, or the eye is merely supposed to be a catalyst to some really bad behavior for Veles’s entertainment. He likely plans on choosing whoever would be the most entertaining as his primary antagonist, no matter what he intimated before the contest. I’m willing to bet that he wants to watch everyone fight amongst themselves, see who is capable of getting along, who is willing to come up with the most thoughtful and clever ways of overcoming obstacles, and who is likely to provide him with the biggest intellectual challenges in the future.

“I’m a god of chaos and trickery. I reserve the right to stretch loopholes to the breaking point.”

Other than 84, I believe that the characters were selected for arrogance and being disparaging of others. Look at some sample comments they have made.

http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/10152014/ Phlogiston “A Renaissance Festival. Think of them as Monty Python re-enactments where they sell turkey legs.” (I wouldn’t be surprised if Veles was a RenFest and Monty Python fan. And when he says “And now for something completely different”, it really is different.)

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